Here’s why you should stop trying to predict the future of your business.

Who wouldn’t want to know what the future holds? Especially in business, where inventing the Next Big Thing could mean market-share domination for decades.

Yet predicting the future is all but impossible (unless the Next Big Thing you come up with is a time machine). Despite the best efforts of psychics, astrologers, and scientists, nothing has ever consistently worked — crystal balls and studying the past are no more effective than a blindfolded monkey throwing darts. In short, you have absolutely no hope of predicting the future.

On the bright side, neither does anyone else. In fact, when it comes to determining the future, it’s a pretty level playing field. Every company in the same boat regardless of size — larger companies have more resources but are slower, while smaller companies have fewer resources but are more nimble.

But, for all practical purposes, there’s really only one way to know for certain where the industry is headed.

Don’t try to predict the future, invent it yourself.

That’s right. Instead of waiting and reacting to competitors’ innovations, you have to disrupt your own industry yourself.

Inthis recent TED talk, Joi Ito, head of the MIT Media Lab, spoke about how the Internet has democratized innovation in every field. Everyone is now capable of changing the world with ideas, not just institutions.

He lambasts the old, top-down model of formally planning, prepping, and presenting ideas, only to then have to ask for permission to proceed (alliteration slam!). Instead, he advocates the more efficient bottom-up model, pushing innovation away from the center (i.e. your R&D department) to the outer edges of the network (i.e. Everyone else).

Now that the cost of trying new things is near zero, Joi contends, innovators don’t need to plan, prototype, or get permission from management to act on an idea, they can just go build it. It’s a fundamentally new model that’s “chaotic and hard-to-control” but one that’s more productive and efficient.

Luckily, you already have the necessary resources (your employees) to implement this approach, you just need the tools to effectively “control the chaos.” And that’s where tibbr, the Enterprise Social Networking Platform, comes in.

tibbr makes crowd-sourcing innovation easy.

Since innovation can come from anywhere, tibbr makes it simple to gather lots of ideas from “the edges” of your own internal network. Its social capabilities make tibbr easy to get ideas and inspiration from anyone, regardless of their job title, department, or office location. With the tibbr Ideas app, you can easily solicit, share, build upon, improve and manage all those employees’ ideas.